It's the summer of SHIP! I'm going for it. I can build very large ships using a white color base and dark bley greebling, and I love the way bright colors pop off of white, so that's my chosen color setup. As to the ordering part of this query, how do you SHIP Builders estimate what to buy on bricklink? Is it worth my time building one section and doing a piece count?

I don't want to give away a lot of my design ideas, but essentially, I'm going to be building with walls rather than plates, like builder42's Valley Forge.

So if I build a plate-and-technic frame, do I want to attach this to the outer shell by a series of points? For instance, I have an outer rectangular shell, and inside, I have beams that meet both walls and a center beam for support. This seems to cut down the potential for interior, but I don't know how much tensile strength walls have after 100 studs.

Since this is a first SHIP, i'm going with exactly 100 studs, or close to it. Wish me luck..... Thanks for any help.

I don't have any experience with technic frames, but I do know that as long as the walls are reasonably solid (ie, not held together in the middle by a single connection) then they should be reasonably sturdy. I've built a few SHIPs where there's just a pair of continuous walls and a plate floor and roof. It's not very swooshable but it won't disintegrate either.

I've decided on a color theme, and traded some SW figs to FBTB user schlectus for white walls, dark grey modified bricks for greebs, and many other assorted goodies. My color theme is going to be white and tan, with bley greebling, to give it an old school space shuttle vibe. it's going to look very spacer-colony and beat up, and it's DEFINITELY going to have an external repair bay, which not a lot of SHIP's have. Progress should begin in the next 2 weeks!

I hope this isn't specific enough that it spoils my new SHIP, but one of the white sections is going to be connected to greebs front and back, and instead of walls on the side, I'll have opening panels. This obviously lends itself to structural instability.

Because the only connection in that section will be the roof and floor, I figure I'll take technic bricks in a plethora, plate them, and put them in the floor and the cieling. So I'll have a "strut" in the top and bottom that runs length of the ship.

This sounds cool! If you have to bricklink parts, I suggest building your vision rainbow style first, that way, you can see what you need for each section beforehand. It sounds like you've got the frame down, which is great! The guy who built the valley forge (Mike Yoder) also has a lot of great breakdown pics of frames in his photostream. Like this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoderism/3 ... hotostream